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Beer Review: New Belgium Accumulation

Despite being completely translucent, snow appears white because the crystal lattices of each flake contain so many tiny facets that they diffuses the entire color spectrum on their way to the ground. It’s like a reverse version of the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon falling lazily from the sky a million times over.

But this winter for me, for once, for real, isn’t about the twinkling aggregation of frozen water that piles up so beautifully on my lawn. It isn’t about the trance inducing schizophrenic blinking of the LEDs framing the houses in my neighborhood. It isn’t about the joyful chorus of Bing and Frank and Dean that floats so nostalgically into my ears from every speaker.

This winter is about fingers and keyboards and quiet clacking long into the night. Words, not snow, will fall this winter.

Despite appearing blank, the white background of a newly opened Word document is actually millions of engineered points producing every color as a literal carte blanche. What looks like nothing, a void of anything, is actually everything, all at once.

But this winter isn’t about empty Word documents, or sullen writers block, or bouts of seasonal affective disorder. It’s not about regret or longing, or trying to find meaning in what was otherwise a pretty bleak year.

This winter is about sharp black letters etched into the flesh of a white form, tens of thousands in little lines like mustering soldiers, all waiting their turn to see the front lines.

Despite being called white, a white IPA is more of an opaque gold, giving new meaning to the idea of yellow snow. White IPA is a marriage of the complexity of high hoppage and the effervescence of a wit, all while retaining a singular, unique identity that nods to both styles but lives as neither.

But this winter isn’t about trying to identify as something that already exists. It isn’t about assimilating, or conforming, or finding comfort in the protection of the familiar.

This is a winter of words, of intent, of future; watching my words pile up in drifts, watching the bubbles rise in my glass like an upside down blizzard, watching them accumulate at the top like a pristine, un-walked-through blanket of perfect white.